f you want to appreciate the return of the left as a significant force in American politics, treat yourself to a quiet evening with the 2012 Democratic Party platform. This vast accumulation of words, over 26,000 in all, contains no fewer than 42 invocations of “the middle class,” 28 calls for “innovation,” and 18 promises of “tax credits.” Its first policy section places “Middle Class Tax Cuts” atop the list of Barack Obama’s achievements as president. And amid this great desert of focus-grouped language, boundless and bare, there rises not a single demand for a major universal public program.

How much has changed in the last few years. At the grass roots, the evidence for some kind of left-wing resurgence is too overwhelming for all but the most jaundiced or mechanical skeptic to deny: the wave of victorious labor strikes from West Virginia to Los Angeles, the advent of new activist movements like Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March, the rise of left political organizations (the Democratic Socialists of America grew from 6,500 members in 2014 to about 60,000 today), and the election of avowedly radical candidates to city governments, state legislatures, and Congress itself.

Amid this hive of activity, national opinion has pitched sharply to the left: Surveys now show record-high levels of support for same-sex marriage, legal marijuana, and a range of affirmative-action programs. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the apparent leftward shift in economic opinion. Recent polls have discovered commanding public support for social-democratic programs long exiled from mainstream politics: a national single-payer health-care plan, a federal jobs guarantee, universal parental leave and child care, and tuition-free college, along with heavy income and wealth taxes on the super-rich.

As the 2012 platform reminds us, it was not so long ago that Democratic Party leaders refused even to acknowledge the existence of such policies, let alone pay lip service to them. In 2013, President Barack Obama responded to the nascent Fight for $15 movement, which was beginning to organize fast-food workers, with a bold proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 per hour. Throughout Obama’s second term, national politics churned on with barely a reference to a left-wing vision of the possible: In 2014, the phrase “Medicare for all” appeared in The New York Times just once, in a single forlorn letter to the editor.

Now the Democratic National Committee champions a $15 minimum wage on its website. More than 100 congressional Democrats—including presidential aspirants Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand—have lined up behind a national health-care bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders. The same presidential candidates have backed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a Green New Deal while touting a range of additional proposals like tuition-free college, a federal jobs guarantees, and direct cash transfers.

There is reason for skepticism about the sincerity and intensity of these new commitments, especially when brandished by ambitious politicians whose records do not match their rhetoric. But such weather vanes are finely attuned to the direction of the wind. And the atmosphere of center-left politics has changed since 2013, or even 2016, when Hillary Clinton chose to frame her campaign in Iowa around the certainty that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass.”

What explains this swift ideological transformation? Over the longer term, no doubt, it owes its origins to the political and economic upheaval that has gripped much of the industrialized world in the last decade. Forty years of globalizing markets, deregulating states, declining unions, flattening wages, expanding debt, and skyrocketing inequality—administered by governments of the right and center-left alike—established the conditions for general political revolt, the reverberations of which could be seen from Wisconsin to Greece. Yet this broader crisis, by itself, hardly ensured a renaissance of social democracy in the United States. Across the Atlantic, the anti-establishment upheaval has boosted right-wing nationalists more often than movements of the left; its most immediate impact on American politics, after all, was the election of Donald Trump. And so one must look for more acute reasons for social democracy’s revival, and no better one can be found than Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president. So many of the ideas, tactics, and even key players of the current moment—including Ocasio-Cortez, a former Sanders-campaign volunteer—emerged in the context of that remarkable primary run. As new books by Sanders and his 2016 campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, help demonstrate, the Vermont socialist’s long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination did not just succeed in “pushing Clinton to the left”; it helped transform the shape and content of progressive politics in the United States.

ompared with the leading Democrats of his generation and of the generations that followed, Bernie Sanders lacks a certain courtly polish. He grew up in a rent-controlled three-and-a-half-room apartment in Brooklyn, where his father, like Warren’s father, worked as a salesman. But unlike Warren—or Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O’Rourke—Sanders did not nurture his political ambitions on the campus of an Ivy League university. (If elected in 2020, he will be the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter without a graduate degree.) At 38 years old—an age when Joe Biden was already fighting school integration in the Senate and Harris was enlisting millionaire donors to back her run for San Francisco district attorney—Sanders was working for the American People’s Historical Society of Burlington, Vermont, on a documentary about Eugene Debs.

If the social milieu of Sanders’s formative years was distinctive, his political education was even more so. At the University of Chicago, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, read Marx and Lincoln and Dewey in the library basement, and fought for civil rights as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality. For the young Bernie, real politics was what happened outside the corridors of power: After being arrested at a Chicago sit-in, he told the writer Russell Banks, “I saw right then and there the difference between real life and the official version of life. And I knew I believed in one and didn’t believe any more in the other.”

Real politics, for Sanders, also meant third-party politics. In the late 1960s, he moved to Vermont and spent nearly a decade running for state office with the left-wing Liberty Union Party. Though he never won much more than 6 percent of the vote statewide, he made headlines with his calls for worker-controlled businesses, publicly owned utilities, a guaranteed family income, and, at one point, a redistribution of the Rockefeller family fortune.

Such deep roots in third-party struggle make Sanders a black swan not only among today’s Democratic elite but across American political history. To find an influential national figure with such an extensive background outside the two-party system, you have to return to Debs and the Socialists in the early 20th century or, perhaps, Salmon Chase and the antislavery radicals who helped found the Republican Party before the Civil War. Like the political abolitionists of that era, Sanders has spent his life working to find a party to advance his cause, rather than finding a cause that can advance his party. Nor has that cause wavered very much in half a century. Interviewed by United Press International at the start of his first Liberty Union Party campaign in 1972, he produced a paragraph that could be pasted into a tweet today: “If we wanted to, we could have decent housing and free medical care and jobs for everyone…. It won’t happen because the wealth and money lies in the hands of a few people who are not concerned with the welfare of others.”

In March 1981, Sanders ran as an independent candidate to become the mayor of Burlington. This time, he pulled off an astonishing upset, defeating the Democratic incumbent by a mere 10 votes and taking office just weeks after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Yet even as the international political climate turned against social democracy, Bernie forged ahead. Confronted with a uniformly hostile city establishment (Republican and Democratic alike), Mayor Sanders boosted worker-owned businesses and established a community land trust to fund affordable housing, the first such municipal program in the United States. Although the courts and the state legislature blocked his most ambitious efforts to overhaul the tax code, by the time he left office, Burlington had become a model city for egalitarian, public-led economic development.

Sanders was a pragmatic administrator of municipal government, but he never abandoned the politics of class struggle. Using his bully pulpit to defeat a waterfront development project that he called “a rich man’s paradise,” he positioned himself as a champion of lower-income housing. In each of his three re-election campaigns, he won a larger share of the vote, driven by rising turnout from his young and heavily working-class base. And as he once again began to set his sights on winning a statewide seat, the song remained the same: His 2016 campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recalls in How Bernie Won that during Sanders’s 1986 run for governor, the candidate delivered an identical lecture about “income inequality and tax fairness” in almost every town in Vermont. Sanders’s “message discipline and consistent use of the stump speech, while unexciting to the media, was a great strength…. It allowed him to carry out an intensely crammed schedule of events without having to incorporate new material.”

This description by Weaver could serve as shorthand for Sanders’s entire career in politics. Journalists and academics worship at the shrine of originality, but for a social democrat in the late 20th century, consistency has proved the rarer virtue.

fter two failed campaigns for state office, Sanders won a place in the House in 1990. (“I was never inside the Capitol until after I ran for Congress,” he notes in his own new book, Where We Go From Here.) In Washington, he proved to be an effective legislator, passing more roll-call amendments in a Republican-controlled House than any other member. Real politics, it turned out, sometimes happened inside Congress, too, and Sanders fought in the trenches to eke out funding for low-income weatherization assistance and community health centers. In small but tangible ways, workers, consumers, and especially veterans benefited from his ability to cobble together unlikely voting coalitions on Capitol Hill.

In world-historical terms, though, Sanders swam against a heavy current. In August 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and capitalism’s tribunes proclaimed that history itself had come to an end, he was in Stockholm, on a trip to meet with Swedish Social Democrats and unionists. “Social democracy—a political party of the people—is something we want to take a good look at,” he told reporters. But in Washington, the Democratic Party was looking harder than ever in the other direction, leaving Sanders to record protest votes against NAFTA, capital-gains tax cuts, and telecom and financial deregulation—all of them in bills supported by Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi. Watching the Democrats devote their 1996 national convention to the questions of “gun control, smoking, and the personal tragedy of a popular actor [Christopher Reeve],” Bernie fumed that there “was virtually no discussion of class, despite the fact that we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world.”

Ideologically, Sanders was still nestled away in Burlington, a curious accident of the 1970s, compounding over the decades like a forgotten postal-bank account. His 2006 move from the House to the Senate did little to enhance his national influence, or to moderate his critique of the Democratic leadership. After the 2008 financial crisis, Sanders spent much of the Obama years waging a lonely campaign against the Wall Street–friendly status quo. One of just four members of the Democratic Caucus to vote against Timothy Geithner’s nomination as Treasury secretary, he also opposed Geithner’s replacement, former Citigroup executive Jack Lew, in 2013. “We need a Treasury secretary prepared to take on an oligarchy which now controls the economic and political life of this great nation,” Sanders declared on the Senate floor. “Is Jack Lew that person? No, he is not.” Was anyone listening? It’s not clear, since every Democratic senator, including Warren, voted to confirm Obama’s nominee.

In Washington, Sanders remained a figure of the fringe. When he announced that he would challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, pundits issued a collective guffaw. “Socialist to Snap at Clinton’s Heels,” brayed The Hill. “There seems to be very little desire on the left for a challenger to Clinton,” argued FiveThirtyEight, as usual better attuned to the Beltway elite than the electorate. But it was no coincidence that every loyal party progressive stayed out of the primary race: Obama and the Democratic leadership had worked hard to clear the field for Clinton, successfully discouraging runs by Biden and Warren, among other possible contenders.

This cleared field ironically produced the void that allowed an underdog campaign to flourish. Sanders made the most of his opportunity, balancing his attacks on the billionaire class with a bluntly social-democratic platform that promised health care, tuition-free college, and a living wage to every American. For the first time since Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign, the media were forced to cover a left-wing candidate seriously. And though much of this coverage was condescending, if not outright contemptuous, the message reached voters with remarkable speed. When Sanders entered the race in April 2015, he was polling at 5 percent nationwide; by August, he had a lead in New Hampshire. Democratic voters—and not just them, it turned out—were far hungrier for “political revolution” than anyone in Washington had guessed.

he stage was set for almost an entire year of fierce primary combat. For veterans of the 2016 campaign, Weaver’s How Bernie Won offers a chance to relive the glories and agonies of battle, complete with fulsome military analogies—one chapter is called “Stalingrad, Iowa”—and plenty of excerpts from the nonstop social-media crossfire. As Weaver notes, Clinton and Sanders fought each other on two different fronts and for two distinct prizes: the 2016 Democratic nomination, and the ideological trajectory of national politics thereafter.

On the first front, Sanders lost decisively. Although he won 22 states and more than 13 million votes, after the first few contests, he never threatened Clinton in the all-important delegate race. Weaver expends considerable energy lamenting the many reasons: the close collaboration between the front-runner and the Democratic National Committee; Clinton’s 20-fold advantage among superdelegates, which lent her an air of invincibility; and an unfriendly media eager to run hostile stories about Sanders (in the most egregious of many examples, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post repeated and never corrected false reports of Sanders supporters “throwing chairs” during the Nevada state convention).

Yet looking back on the race three years later, the most important reason for Clinton’s primary victory was her overwhelming advantage in resources. Before a single ballot was cast, no fewer than 180 of 188 congressional Democrats had lined up behind her; eventually, 1,100 state legislators backed the front-runner, compared with just over 150 for Sanders. By July 2015, Clinton had already raised $46.7 million, plus $30 million in super-PAC money, far outstripping Sanders, whose small-dollar fund-raising operation was only starting to gain steam. When the race began, his projected campaign spending for all of 2015 was just $12 million.

The defining challenge for the Sanders campaign, as Weaver puts it in typically martial fashion, was “how a much smaller force in terms of resources and infrastructure would be able to defeat a much larger one.” Sanders and Weaver made the only choice they thought they had, investing heavily in the first four state contests, Iowa and New Hampshire in particular. This strategy helped Bernie record the upsets that put him on the national map, but it left the campaign with few resources to compete in the pivotal Southern primaries immediately afterward. Clinton’s blowout victories in Texas, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida—where Sanders spent almost no money on direct media—gave her an insurmountable delegate lead and virtually ended the competitive struggle for the nomination.

Yet on the primary’s second major front—the battle for the ideological future of the country—Sanders has been an equally decisive winner. In the summer 2016 negotiations over the Democratic platform, Weaver recounts, Clinton’s team initially shot down proposals for a $15 minimum wage and universal tuition-free college while refusing to back away from Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Three years later, many Democrats now stand much closer to Bernie than Hillary on wages, college, and trade policy. The national debate on health care has shifted even more dramatically: “Medicare for All” has become a familiar and popular rallying cry, while Clinton’s opening position in 2016—that we must restrict ourselves to “improving” the Affordable Care Act with tax credits—is now almost starved of support outside of the insurance lobby itself.

It would be wrong to say that the Democratic Party, in its current institutional form, is anything like the party of Bernie Sanders. Business-friendly moderates still make up its largest congressional caucus, billionaire donors (and billionaire politicians) remain close to its leadership, and even many Washington progressives appear willing to dump Medicare for All for some plausible-sounding substitute. Nevertheless, the larger pattern is clear. On issue after issue, from wealth taxes to climate change to corporate PAC money, the national debate has moved away from the cautious incrementalism of the Clinton campaign and toward the bold social-democratic agenda laid out by Sanders in 2016.

or all his remarkable consistency, Sanders has evolved, too. Throughout the 1980s, he argued that the “corporate-controlled Republican and Democratic parties…are, in reality, one party—the party of the ruling class.” His Vermont career was built not on cooperation with Democrats but on bitter competition with them. When he appeared at a county Democratic meeting to endorse Jackson in 1988, a local partisan slapped him in the face—for speaking against the official favorite, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, as well as for trying to break up the party by “passing himself [off] as a Democrat.”

In the years since, Sanders has gotten much better at passing himself off as a Democrat—not in order to break up the party but to transform it through popular struggle. But as the 2020 primary takes shape, some have wondered if he will become a victim of his own success: With a slate of Democratic candidates who now endorse much of his 2016 platform, what distinguishes him from his progressive rivals?

On foreign policy, the gaps between Sanders and Democratic Party orthodoxy remain considerable. A reliable opponent of US defense spending and military interventions, from Vietnam to Libya, Sanders can boast an equally long record of skepticism toward America’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, which he spent three decades denouncing as a “feudalistic dictatorship.” In the 2016 campaign, he largely steered clear of international affairs, but he has devoted much more attention to them since. He worked alongside Senator Chris Murphy to end US support for the Saudi war in Yemen; more generally, as he describes in Where We Go From Here, he has sought to connect his anti-interventionist instincts to a broader global confrontation with economic inequality and climate change.

Much about a possible Sanders foreign policy remains uncertain, including its approach to trade relations with China, its attitude toward Israel and Palestine, and its outlook on the 800-some military bases that the United States maintains around the world. Denouncing the “military-industrial complex” is one thing; dismantling it, quite another. Nevertheless, a view of international politics that rejects the premise of US global hegemony, as Sanders does, is already worlds apart from anything dreamed up within official Democratic circles, where enthusiasm for a new Cold War against Russian and Chinese “neo-authoritarianism” is brewing.

On domestic politics, too, Sanders remains distinctive. Since 2016, Democrats have remembered what Clinton’s campaign somehow contrived to forget: that rhetorical class war, including a defense of wage earners against the ultra-rich, is an effective electoral strategy. Yet the rest of the party envisions class politics primarily as a tool of partisan politics, a cudgel to bash Trump’s Republicans for their heartlessness and hypocrisy. Fundamentally, this is nothing new: The Democrats’ 2012 platform, for all its barrenness of vision, contained plenty of digs at the GOP as the party of “the wealthiest Americans.”

Sanders, by contrast, understands that the rise of the 1 percent is a bipartisan phenomenon. “Our economy, our political life, and the media,” he writes, “are largely controlled by a handful of billionaires and large corporations…. I believe that the Democratic Party bears an enormous amount of responsibility for this sad state of affairs.” And unlike the party’s leadership, he recognizes that the power of the ownership class extends far beyond the nebulous special interests that every politician denounces. While no other national Democrat, Warren included, even uses the phrase “corporate media,” Sanders rightly makes it a recurring theme in his critique of billionaire rule.

If this diagnosis of the problem diverges from the rest of the Democratic field’s, so too does his proposed remedy. A number of candidates now say they want to tame the ultra-rich with new taxes and regulations, while making essential goods more affordable for those earning lower incomes. But in contrast to means-tested programs like Harris’s LIFT Act, Sanders champions unapologetically universal programs: medical care, college education, living-wage jobs, retirement income, and environmental safety for everyone.

Contrary to much disingenuous criticism, this does not mean that Sanders refuses to recognize historically specific inequalities of gender and race. On questions of discrimination, pay equity, mass incarceration, and civil rights, his rhetoric and record have been far in advance of the Democratic Party’s mainstream for quite some time. (Many surveys have shown that Sanders’s strongest national support comes from women and people of color; the vast majority of black voters, regardless of their 2016 primary choice, continue to view him favorably.) The difference is not what Sanders does not say but what he does say: that every American, including those who voted for Trump, is entitled to the universal protections of social democracy.

Rather than battle Republicans by targeting a “Democratic base” defined by strict demographics—the preferred strategy of many progressives today—Sanders seeks to overcome the power of the ultra-rich by rallying a much larger coalition of the working and middle classes. Bernie’s America is not divided between red and blue states or vicious and virtuous voters but between the rulers and the ruled. This may be one reason Sanders, alone among the politicians classed as “progressive,” has remained popular with independent voters.

ven without a Hillary Clinton–like juggernaut in the race, Sanders faces a tough fight for the 2020 nomination. Despite his broad popularity, there is little evidence that he has made inroads with his most difficult demographic, the very reliable voters over the age of 65. Nor is there much reason to believe that the politicians and donors atop the Democratic Party will view this Sanders campaign more favorably than the last one—and if an inconclusive primary race leads to a brokered convention, it is difficult to imagine him emerging as the nominee.

Above all, Sanders must contend with a mood inside the Democratic Party—powerful among its leaders and voters alike—that the only issue of consequence in 2020 is defeating Trump. Bernie’s struggle, from Chicago to Burlington to Capitol Hill, has always been much larger than defeating a single opponent. As he said in his March 2 speech in Brooklyn announcing his 2020 run, his goal is not simply to win an election but to build a movement that can “transform this country.”

From Weaver to Ocasio-Cortez, nearly every progressive figure today is urging the Democrats to reclaim the bold mantle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet Sanders rounds out the introduction to Where We Go From Here with a quotation from another president who led an even bolder movement and whose election spurred an even greater transformation. The hoariest words in American history—Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg vow to defend “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”—are also, Sanders reminds us, some of the most radical. To overthrow an entrenched oligarchy and claim a “new birth of freedom” based on democratic equality for all: That would be a political revolution worth fighting for.

The life of Abraham Lincoln abounds with dramatic contradiction. Born into a Kentucky poverty as obscure as it was desperate, Lincoln died a global icon, mourned by emperors from Brazil to Turkey, and later cherished as an inspiration by Japanese sugar workers in Hawaii and anticolonial activists in Ghana. Haunted all his life by a lack of education—as a middle-aged state legislator, he still spelled the word “very” with two R’s—Lincoln is now routinely celebrated as our most literary president, a terse and natural poet of American aspiration.1

With a life marked by personal tragedy—he lost his mother at age 9, his only sister at 19, his fiancée at 26, and two children in midlife—Lincoln was prone to intense bouts of depression. Nevertheless, he held fast to what can only be called a profoundly optimistic political philosophy, defined by a deep trust in the unity of moral and material progress and a sanguine belief that the “central idea” of American life was the “equality of all men.” Devoting the great bulk of his career to dusty rural courtrooms and quotidian provincial politics, Lincoln ultimately led the country’s greatest political revolution, and soon after its greatest social revolution, too—the bloody transformation of 4 million Americans from property into people.2

In this essential dramatic sense, the life of Lincoln is a biographer’s dream. WorldCat, an online catalog of global library holdings, lists nearly 24,000 books on Lincoln, more than the numbers for George Washington and Adolf Hitler combined. But his life also presents a formidable challenge: how to square Lincoln’s real and appealing ordinariness—“one rais’d through the commonest average of life,” as Walt Whitman put it—with his utterly extraordinary career. For his first 45 years, Lincoln cut many figures: dirt-poor farm boy in Indiana, hackish Whig politico in Springfield, prosperous railroad lawyer riding the Illinois circuit. But few of these roles, in a strict sense, had much to do with the colossal drama that tore the union apart and made Lincoln a world-historical symbol of emancipation.3

n A Self-Made Man: 1809–1849 and Wrestling With His Angel: 1849–1856— the first two installments of a projected four-volume study on The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln—Sidney Blumenthal approaches this dilemma with a winningly old-fashioned strategy. His study of Lincoln is not a pure biography so much as something that 19th-century readers would have understood as a “life and times”: a sweeping narrative of antebellum American politics in which our hero only intermittently dominates the action. Where other recent biographers have drilled inward, exploring the social universe of central Illinois or Lincoln’s own complex psychology, Blumenthal continually leaps outward, offering a detailed tableau of major events in state and national politics: the nullification crisis of 1832, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Compromise of 1850. Lincoln’s major antagonist in Illinois, the Democratic leader Stephen Douglas, at times receives almost equal billing; a host of additional rivals and allies, from William Seward to Jefferson Davis, are given extended treatments of their own.4

This deep context matters to Blumenthal, because his guiding biographical insight is that Lincoln the great statesman and Lincoln the piddling politician were the same man. Blumenthal has no patience for a mythology that puts Honest Abe somehow above and beyond the sordid realm of everyday politics. Lincoln, he writes, “never believed politics corrupted him. He always believed that politics offered the only way to achieve his principles.” If we are to understand Lincoln, Blumenthal argues, we must understand the world of antebellum political conflict: messy, rivalrous, jobbing, venal, and yet still an arena where momentous struggles over the American future were fought. “If it were not for Lincoln the politician,” Blumenthal explains, “Lincoln the Great Emancipator would never have existed.”5

In some ways, of course, this can be read as Blumenthal’s self-flattering interpretation of 19th-century America: Few antebellum politicos could match the author’s own insider credentials. Since the early 1990s, Blumenthal’s career has been defined by proximity to power in the form of Bill and Hillary Clinton. As a New Yorker correspondent, White House adviser, and, more recently, a highly paid (if unclearly tasked) employee of the Clinton Foundation, Blumenthal has remained Bill and Hillary’s most pugnacious and loquacious loyalist, half-courtier and half-captain-at-arms. Often lobbing a wisp of flattery or a salivating suggestion back to the palace courtyard, for the most part he has earned his keep as a fierce and perhaps not overly scrupulous defender of Fortress Clinton.6

Blumenthal’s relish for political combat sprinkles these pages with dashes of spiky wit. Weak entrants into the field of battle are summarily drawn and quartered: The New York radical Gerrit Smith is dismissed as a “delusional…trust fund abolitionist”; the “preternaturally bland” Millard Fillmore comes off as “a man without qualities,” whose “vanity exceeded his mediocrity.” Of the obese and unimaginative Democrat Lewis Cass, Blumenthal writes that “he had the momentum of inertia.”7

But what really distinguishes Blumenthal’s analysis is his focus on politics as a relentless war for public opinion. In 1844, for instance, Congressman John Quincy Adams stormed over to the State Department and charged Secretary John C. Calhoun with abusing census data in order to fill his official correspondence with proslavery talking points. Blumenthal comments acidly: “Adams’s ruthless humiliation of Calhoun, exposing his intellectual and political squalor before an audience consisting mainly of himself, was personally gratifying…but had no public resonance.” For Blumenthal, this kind of moral and intellectual performance, totally devoid of popular effect, doesn’t even qualify as a political act.8

So Blumenthal prizes Lincoln’s oratory not for its pure philosophical power, but for the political work it accomplished. Unlike Adams, Blumenthal’s Lincoln “was always tactical and strategic. Deliberate, methodical, and meticulous, he crafted every line for political impact.”9

o capture Lincoln’s mastery of popular rhetoric, Blumenthal’s books are studded with lively, often insightful close readings of his speeches and writing. In almost all of them, context takes precedence over text. The famous 1838 Springfield Lyceum Address, in which a young Lincoln worried that a man of “towering genius” might subvert American democracy? Blumenthal reads it as an ironic warning shot aimed at the would-be Napoleon of the Illinois Democrats, the five-foot-tall Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s first major antislavery speech, also delivered in Springfield, 15 years later? Blumenthal shows that it was not just an ethical argument for human equality or a constitutional case for the restriction of slavery, but also a fundamentally “strategic” effort to organize the diverse strands of antislavery opinion into a coherent and viable opposition.10

Blumenthal’s method bears the deficits of its virtues. His focus on context sometimes obscures the deeper ideological stakes of political warfare: We learn much about tactics and positioning, but less about what kind of world the various combatants were trying to build. It also produces a narrative that careens fitfully across the mid-19th-century American scene. In every section of Blumenthal’s first two volumes, there is a digressive chapter; in every chapter, a digressive paragraph; in every paragraph, a digressive parenthesis. Some of these side trips are worthwhile, as when Blumenthal uses a legal dispute over Mary Todd’s inheritance to recount the violent death of antislavery politics in antebellum Kentucky. Other excursions, including a sensationalized spin on the politics of Mormonism in Illinois—drawn largely from outdated secondary sources—are much less rewarding. And Blumenthal’s relentless parentheses, stuffed to the gills with odd scraps of political genealogy, eventually grate on the reader’s patience.11

At times, the accumulated experience feels less like absorbing a master narrative of American politics than being buttonholed in the corner of a smoke-filled room by a zestful and manically rambling party boss. Between gulps of whiskey, he might delight his audience with a story about how a Kentucky abolitionist blocked a pistol bullet with his knife scabbard, then cut off his assailant’s ear—but he is just as likely to tell you, for the third time, about the spectacular feats of wire-pulling that put Millard Fillmore on the 1848 Whig ticket in place of Abbott Lawrence.12

he larger problem is that a biography of Abraham Lincoln, however expansive, is an awkward vehicle for covering the terrain that Blumenthal really wants to explore: the collapse of the American party system and the emergence of a mass political organization opposed to slavery. The trouble is that Lincoln did not make the Republican Party; it would be closer to the truth to say that the Republican Party made Lincoln. In some ways, Blumenthal’s detailed narrative of Lincoln’s pre-1854 political career makes this clearer than ever before.13

From the moment he entered politics as a 23-year-old candidate for the Illinois Legislature, Lincoln devoted himself to opposing Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. The quaint style of Lincoln’s early career—a “gawky and rough looking fellow,” friends recalled, with his pantaloons six inches above his shoes—is much better remembered than its specific content. But Lincoln’s politics were always both deeply partisan and deeply ideological. He was above all an acolyte of Henry Clay, and for two full decades a loyal and ardent Whig. As a state-legislative captain in the 1830s, and a central Illinois party boss in the 1840s, Lincoln gave the best years of his youth to the Whig economic agenda: defending banks, tariffs, railroads, and canals, and opposing Jacksonian attempts to subvert them.14

To be sure, Lincoln quietly nurtured more radical convictions. “I have always hated slavery,” he told a Chicago audience in 1858, “I think as much as any Abolitionist.” Blumenthal makes much of this personal belief, tracing the influence of antislavery ideas on the Lincoln family’s migration out of Kentucky, and arguing persuasively that Lincoln’s own teenage experience as an indentured farm laborer in Indiana fueled his “unsmotherable hate” for the peculiar institution.15

Yet for the first 45 years of Lincoln’s life, the gap between the personal and the political could hardly have been larger. Lincoln’s hatred for slavery may not have been smothered, but under the heavy blanket of Whiggery it was certainly suppressed. Although the young Lincoln found a handful of isolated opportunities to record an antislavery preference, he was enlisted far more often in a national political effort that necessarily involved attacks on abolitionism, and sometimes—as in the 1840 presidential campaign—accusations that his opponents supported “negro suffrage” or some similar horror.16

The Whig Party was a national organization, which meant that Southern slaveholders constituted a critical mass of its voters and a critical wing of its leadership. Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” the Whig hero Henry Clay, was himself an owner of slaves. Clay won fame as the Great Compromiser, the man who crafted the sectional bargains that saved the union from dissolution time and again. But the terms of Clay’s settlements required the question of slavery to remain outside national politics. And the one group that Clay never compromised with was the abolitionists: Their “wild, reckless, and abominable theories,” he declared in 1850, “strike at the foundation of all property.”17

Perhaps the single most dramatic incident of Lincoln’s Whig career came in 1842, when the Democratic state auditor, James Shields, challenged Lincoln to a duel. Lincoln chose broadswords as the weapon and named a fellow Kentucky-born Whig as his second: Albert Taylor Bledsoe, who later moved to Mississippi and became a leading pro- slavery propagandist. The duel was eventually called off, but not before Lincoln spent some afternoons practicing at swords with a future Confederate assistant secretary of war. The great object that brought Lincoln and Bledsoe together—and the issue that sparked the challenge in the first place—was a shared Whiggish conviction that paper notes issued by the State Bank of Illinois should be acceptable for state tax payments. Even as the population of enslaved Americans doubled between 1820 and 1850, these financial debates—rather than the basic question of human beings as property—occupied the greater part of Lincoln’s career as a Whig.18

Blumenthal’s narrative, as if weary of its subject’s political timidity, regularly flashes forward to the future. A Self-MadeMan ends in 1849, but the book is packed with quotations from a later and greater Lincoln—battling slavery with the Republican Party in the 1850s, or with the Union Army in the 1860s, rather than accommodating it with the Whigs in the 1840s. As a Whig, Lincoln’s antislavery feelings did not define his politics; they only adorned them on special occasions. For that to change, a radical transformation was required.19

hat political revolution is the subject of Blumenthal’s second volume. Channeling Shakespeare, Lincoln’s favorite author, Blumenthal has assembled an extensive dramatis personae to stand at the front of each book, but in his overstuffed volumes, the narrative effect is less Macbeth or Hamlet than an antebellum version of Game of Thrones. Across these pages, various factions of House Jackson and House Clay jockey for power in the capital, even as a more desperate and more elemental struggle—over the future of slavery and freedom on the continent—begins to take shape.20

Blumenthal introduces the second book in this vein: “Premonitions of civil war, shattering deaths, fatal compromises, crushing defeats, corrupt bargains, brazen betrayals and reckless ambition joined in a pandemonium of political bedlam. Presidents rose and fell…. On the Western plains, a pristine battlefield was cleared, democracy trampled in the name of popular sovereignty, and ruffians and pilgrims armed for a struggle to the death over slavery.” You can almost hear the beat of dragon wings.21

In fairness, when called upon to describe the battle between slavery and freedom, Lincoln himself was prone to such primal language. “The day of compromise has passed,” he told his law partner William Herndon. “These two great ideas have been kept apart only by the most artful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and held apart. Some day these deadly antagonists will one or the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled.”22

The political transformation of the 1850s unchained these wild beasts, opening the struggle that smashed the party system, spawned the Civil War, and ultimately destroyed slavery itself. Yet as Blumenthal explains, the event that triggered the revolution did not emerge from the agitation of radicals, but from the ambition of politicians. It was Stephen Douglas’s desire to unite and dominate a divided Democratic Party that led him to push for a bill to establish the Nebraska Territory in 1854. Prodded by proslavery leaders in Washington, Douglas agreed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act would annul the Missouri Compromise, essentially removing all legal restrictions on slavery’s westward expansion. He knew the bill would provoke “a hell of a storm,” but the tempest was even wilder than Douglas anticipated, wrecking the Northern Whigs and rousing formerly cautious men like Lincoln to throw in their lots with the new Republican Party.23

Of course, this was only half the story. Why were the foes of slavery so well prepared to make the most of the Kansas- Nebraska Act and the outrages that followed? As Blumenthal acknowledges, this part of the narrative doesn’t center on faithful partisans like Lincoln, but on more daring and experimental antislavery politicians like Ohio’s Salmon Chase and Massachusetts’s Henry Wilson. While Lincoln trudged along under the Whig banner, these third-party radicals developed the constitutional argument—and the political strategy—that equipped antislavery forces to seize control of mainstream politics in 1854 with the launch of the Republican Party.24

Since the early 1840s, as a member of the tiny abolitionist Liberty Party, Chase had struggled to reorient American politics around the fundamental question of slavery. Fortified by a belief that most Northerners opposed the spread of slave institutions into the West, Chase and his allies sought to build an antislavery political organization on the basis of this sturdy if silent majority. An absolute commitment to the nonextension of slavery, they believed, could help an antislavery party win at the polls, toppling the so-called Slave Power in Washington and setting the stage for a political battle against bondage within the South.25

Although Blumenthal covers these antislavery political maneuvers, his view of the larger American struggle against bondage is unfortunately narrow. He describes some of the most dramatic runaway-slave controversies that gripped the North after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but he does not treat the fugitives themselves—or the black and white abolitionists who aided them—as significant political actors. Scoffing at the “absolutism and sectarianism” of activists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, Blumenthal indulges in the hard-boiled insider’s naïveté about the relationship between social movements and political change. He also ignores recent scholarship that has stressed the expansive democratic commitments of these abolitionists and their vital role in mobilizing and sustaining pockets of antislavery opinion across the antebellum era. Drawing an unhelpful contrast between Lincoln’s earthy realism and “the high-flown moral preachments of the abolitionists,” Blumenthal fails to see that what distinguished the 1850s was, in fact, a rare and deep congruence between political radicals and radical activists: What Charles Sumner called the larger “anti-slavery enterprise” stretched from Lincoln all the way to Frederick Douglass.26

This is the history of politics as a history of politicians. Yet on the politicians themselves, Blumenthal delivers the goods. Although Lincoln did not found the mass antislavery movement, when it arrived in 1854, he soon became one of its indispensable leaders: “at first he dodged them,” Blumenthal notes; “but then he led them.” It was Lincoln’s historic task to grasp the constitutional edifice developed by Chase and others and add the democratic muscle required to forge the new majority they had envisioned. This he began to do with a series of remarkable speeches, in which he drew on all the rhetorical and strategic resources of his apprenticeship in antebellum politics. Lincoln ranged selectively but effectively across history in order to prove that “our revolutionary fathers” had really fought to end slavery. He dressed philosophical principle in the homespun garb of common sense: “What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” Above all, he linked the struggle against the master class to the broader cause of popular democracy: The extension of slavery, as Lincoln wrote, “enables the first FEW to deprive the succeeding MANY, of a free exercise of the right of self-government.”27

In the landscape of antebellum America, this amounted to a revolutionary political program. The Republicans sought to contain slavery in order to isolate and terminate it—to put it on the road to “ultimate extinction,” as Lincoln said in 1858. For decades, that kind of antislavery commitment had lived only on the leftmost fringe of American politics. (As recently as 1852, the Free Soil Party, with a similar anti- slavery platform, attracted just 4.9 percent of the national vote.) Yet through the new Republican Party, as Blumenthal notes, “what had been marginal and peripheral could be brought into a new center.”28

Given the course of Blumenthal’s own political career, this point bears emphasis. The centrist position in the 1850s was straightforward: Restore the Missouri Compromise, no less and no more, without any additional cant about overthrowing the Slave Power or blocking all forms of slavery’s expansion. For an antebellum Dick Morris or Mark Penn, this path would have been obvious, and the road to electoral victory clear. But Lincoln fought to remake the center—not to compromise under its immovable weight. On the question of slavery’s future, Lincoln became the Great Uncompromiser.29

“Lincoln,” says Blumenthal, “always wanted to win.” Yet as these volumes show, after 1854 he didn’t want to win simply by gaining office. He wanted to win by changing the world—by affirming what he called “the monstrous injustice of slavery itself,” and by ousting the slaveholding aristocracy that ruled the United States.30

The unglamorous arts of partisan politics helped Lincoln lead the Republican Party, but they cannot explain why that party remained so single-mindedly focused on slavery and so stubbornly opposed to compromise. For Lincoln the Republican, political triumph did not mean winning power by co-opting the ideas of his opposition or developing a “Third Way” between abolition and slavery; it meant rallying a democratic majority behind a shared vision of the possible. This required transformation, not triangulation. Eventually, it took revolution.31

“AFTER FRED. DOUGLASS.—” barked an October 1850 headline in the Mississippi Free Trader, the state’s leading Democratic newspaper. The article below it went on to note: “We are very much pleased to learn that a party of Marylanders are in pursuit of the sweet pet and fragrant expounder of the white negroes of the North. He is a fugitive slave, and the intention is to reclaim him under the late Fugitive Slave Law.”

This was an outstanding antebellum example of what we have lately come to call “fake news.” After eight years as a fugitive, Frederick Douglass had been legally emancipated in 1846 when a group of British abolitionists collected funds to purchase his freedom. No party of Maryland slave-hunters was headed north to pursue him, even after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The Free Trader wasn’t reporting on events; it was indulging in a kind of vicarious hate crime.

Yet in its mix of gossip, malice, and braggadocio, the Free Trader’s false report was characteristic of the opposition that Douglass faced in his lifetime of political struggle. For Mississippi’s Slave Power, Douglass presented an existential threat in two dimensions. First, his physical person, as an ex-slave turned celebrity abolitionist, was a dramatic personification of his radical belief in human equality. To adapt what W.E.B. Du Bois once said of John Brown, Douglass didn’t just use argument, he was himself an argument. Second, Douglass was feared because his oratory had dangerous implications: It might help generate a popular political movement against the slaveholding South. Thus the Mississippi Free Trader reserved equal scorn for the “white negroes of the North”—Douglass’s anti-slavery allies and the larger Northern public that they hoped to awaken.

The power of the antebellum slaveholding class, after all, resided not only in its direct domination of black slaves, but in its ability to divide and exploit an even larger multiracial working class. Douglass knew how well this system worked from bitter personal experience: As a hired slave in Baltimore, he was assaulted by white dockworkers with bricks and handspikes. Yet he remained clearheaded about who benefited from this racial violence. As he wrote in 1855: “The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself…. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers.”

To uproot these plunderers required democratic organization in both the North and South. The obstacles were enormous, Douglass knew, for he seldom underestimated the tenacity of American racism—the prejudices and powers wielded by those Americans “who happen to live in a skin which passes for white.” Nevertheless, the basic premise of his career was that slavery and white supremacy, for all their fearsome might, could be defeated through a political struggle that transcended racial and regional divisions. Only a broad popular movement, led by an abolitionist vanguard but embracing “the masses at the North,” could overthrow “the slave-holding oligarchy” and establish a government truly devoted to liberty and equality for all.

Douglass had no patience for those in the antislavery camp who argued for withdrawal from a hopelessly tainted Union, or for the abandonment of a hopelessly degraded democratic politics. “If I were on board of a pirate ship,” he declared, “I would not clear my soul…by jumping in the long boat, and singing out no union with pirates.” Instead, abolitionists must dig in and fight, trusting in their ability to build a democratic alliance against slavery across the free states. “[T]he slaveholders are but four hundred thousand in number,” he noted, “and we are fourteen millions…we are really the strong and they are the weak.”

For Douglass, political effort without radical moral principle was futile, doomed to a slow, unwholesome demise amid “the swamps of compromise and concession.” But moral courage without political engagement—­and without movement-building—was equally barren. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” Douglass declared in 1857. The apothegm is justly famous as a defense of left-wing agitation, but it is worth remembering that both of its keywords received equal weight. Douglass did not celebrate struggle for struggle’s sake. He struggled because he believed he would win.

n our own troubled times, with reaction regnant and the formal opposition frail and confused, Douglass’s belief in progress may strike readers as something of a quaint anachronism. But two new books—The Lives of Frederick Douglass, by Robert S. Levine, and The Portable Frederick Douglass, edited by John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr.—help underline just how urgently his vision of political struggle is needed today.

Both books pay tribute to Douglass’s immense literary talents. In three decades, he went from the dirt floor of a Maryland slave cabin to a private audience in the White House, where he helped recruit slaves into an army whose mission was the destruction of the master class. His was one of the most remarkable and revolutionary lives of the 19th century, and he did not shy from writing about it: first in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), published seven years after his escape from slavery; then in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), written after his break with William Lloyd Garrison; and finally in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881 and 1892), which brings his story through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Levine’s book, which takes these autobiographies as its primary subject, retraces Douglass’s lifelong effort to tell and retell his own astonishing story. Pushing back against the idea that Douglass’s early intimacy with Garrison means that the Narrative should be read as a “black message” inside a “white envelope,” Levine shows how their collaboration—not at all a simple student-teacher relationship—gave the Narrative much of its power.

Levine also chronicles the dissolution of this collaboration. By the late 1840s, Douglass had become dissatisfied with Garrison’s brand of abolitionism, in part because it abjured electoral politics in favor of a nonviolent form of resistance that placed moral principle above political competition. Levine shows how My Bondageand My Freedom reflects Douglass’s growing sense that the battle against slavery required ballots, and might ultimately demand bullets as well. Above all, he describes the antislavery firebrand as a mind in constant motion: “identity is never stable in Douglass; it is tied to the contingencies of the historical moment.” Politics, ultimately, was about timing, and Douglass subordinated his quest for autobiographical self-understanding to his desire to make political change.

In the introduction to their new volume of Douglass’s writings, Stauffer and Gates extend this argument, discovering in his shifting self-representations something of a philosophical principle. Just as Douglass “rejected the idea of a fixed self, so too did he repudiate fixed social stations and rigid hierarchies.” With his own family tree shrouded in mystery—he never knew the identity of his father—Douglass responded by actively embracing fluidity, change, and the wholesome convulsions of a life devoted to struggle and progress.

orn into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Douglass learned that he could shift his shape, in a fashion, by imitating the voices around him. He preached barnyard sermons on the plantation, affecting the style and cadence of white ministers and addressing his master’s pigs as “Dear Brethren.” His talent for verbal mimicry evolved into a lifelong gift for satirical public speech. Later, on the abolitionist lecture circuit, Douglass would leave crowds in stitches with his canting impression of a hypocritical Southern preacher.

Among their selections, Stauffer and Gates include a previously unpublished 1864–65 speech, “Pictures and Progress,” that highlights Douglass’s own dual sense of himself as an activist and an artist, always striving to remake the boundaries of his world. “Poets, prophets, and reformers,” Douglass argued, “are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power.”

Douglass himself was especially attracted to the new art of photographic picture-­making—­a form in which the sitter, as much as the camera operator, could shape the portrait. It was no coincidence, as Stauffer and Zoe Trodd have noted in a recent collection of Douglass’s portraits, that he became the most photographed American of the 19th century.

As a former slave who claimed his psychic freedom in the course of a two-hour fight with the slave-breaker Edward Covey, Douglass well understood the connection between the physical and the political. It was a duality that demanded both heroic acts of courage and tremendous acts of primping. “A man is ashamed of seeming to be vain of his personal appearance,” he observed in “Pictures and Progress,” “and yet who ever stood before a glass preparing to sit or stand for a picture without a consciousness of some such vanity?”

Paying close attention to his own person—­a regime that involved meticulous grooming, fashionable dress, and even weight training late in life—wasn’t just Douglass’s concession to Victorian notions of self-improvement: It was a core element of his political character. With his body continually in danger, Douglass responded not by withdrawing into private life, but by carefully fashioning an ever stronger and more confident public physical presence.

For Douglass, while politics flowed inevitably through the private and the personal, it always returned to the public and the collective. “Neither self-culture, nor any other kind of culture, can amount to much in this world,” he asserted, “unless joined to some truly unselfish and noble purpose.”

This is the danger in approaching Douglass as a primarily autobiographical writer. Most Americans today know him through the 1845 Narrative, the single-most-assigned book in US history surveys, according to a 2005 study. But a focus on Douglass’s individual odyssey shouldn’t cause us to forget that he devoted his life to a shared struggle against oppression.

Douglass’s own career would be unthinkable without his collaborations with activists and politicians, from Garrison and Martin Delany and Susan B. Anthony to Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln. In his popular antebellum lecture “Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men,” Douglass began by acknowledging that there was no such thing: “all had begged, borrowed, or stolen from somebody or somewhere.” As Levine shows, even his autobiographies were chiefly political documents. They were less concerned with exploring his private identity in formation than with exposing public crimes and inspiring a mass movement against them.

is fitting, then, that Stauffer and Gates have put Douglass’s speeches and journalism at the heart of their new volume. Douglass himself considered his time as a newspaper editor the most important period of his career. “If I have at any time said or written that which is worth remembering,” he concluded in Life and Times, “I must have said such things between the years 1848 and 1860, and my paper was a chronicle of most of what I said during that time.”

Douglass founded his newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester in 1848, on the heels of his ideological split with Garrison and his Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass had grown skeptical of Garri­sonian nonviolence, but the essence of the disagreement was about electoral politics: While Garrison and his allies thought abolitionists should boycott elections organized under a pro-slavery Constitution, Douglass came to believe that the ballot box could and must become a vital tool in the struggle against slavery. “Garrison sees in the Constitution precisely what John C. Calhoun sees there,” he wrote—an impregnable fortress against antislavery political action in the United States. But Douglass believed that abolitionism must reject such rigidities, and he insisted that it become a movement that was as creative, forceful, and open to possibility as democratic politics itself.

A great theme in Douglass’s antebellum writing was the necessary subordination of the past—dead, frozen, irrevocable—to the present: alive, fluid, subject to change. Politics must keep up with its times. “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present,” he declared in his famous 1852 address on slavery and the Fourth of July. “To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time.”

Douglass aimed his remarks at the conservative cult around America’s founders, already well in evidence by the 1850s: “men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly and wickedness of their own.” But his words were also, in their way, a message to his comrades in the antislavery struggle. If abolitionism was to grow from a moral position into a political movement, its advocates could not let themselves be paralyzed by the weight of past horrors. The bloodstained history of slavery in America—200 years of pillage, torture, and domination—did not drive his thoughts upward, toward the promises of a peaceful heaven, or inward, toward the safety of a beautiful despair. Instead, Douglass turned outward, toward the daily rigors of struggle and the political possibilities of what he called “the ever-living now.”

For Douglass, the American future was not foreclosed. Seldom beguiled by the mythology of national exceptionalism—“Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor”—Douglass nevertheless rejected the view, as fashionable then as it is now among some quarters of the left, that his homeland was somehow constitutionally impervious to change. “I know of no country,” he declared in 1857, “where the conditions for affecting great changes in the settled order of things…are more favorable than here in these United States.”

This confidence in that dark hour stemmed from a specific political calculation. Reaction, he believed, had overreached itself. The Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and the Dred Scott decision, all “measures devised and executed with a view to allay and diminish the anti-slavery agitation, have only served to increase, intensify, and embolden that agitation.” The advance of the Slave Power, red in tooth and claw, had torn up the old rotten compromises, exposed the bankruptcy of the old party system, and given new vindication to slavery’s most radical opponents. “Hence, the wolfish cry of ‘fanaticism,’ has lost its potency,” Douglass declared in 1855, “indeed the ‘fanatics’ are looked upon as a pretty respectable body of People.”

A new organized power in American politics, the Republican Party, had emerged from the ruins of the antebellum party system. For Douglass, “the great Republican Movement, which is sweeping like a whirlwind over the Free States,” showed that the North was ready to “bury party affinities…and also the political leaders who have hitherto controlled them; to unite in one grand phalanx, and go forth, and whip the enemy.” Even so, Douglass never became an unconditional supporter of the Republican Party, and often, before the Civil War, he appeared as one of its most scorching critics. Yet in a deeper sense, the electoral triumph of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in 1860 fulfilled one of his fundamental premises: that slavery in the South could only be challenged through a democratic alliance with “the masses at the North.”

When Southern slaveholders responded to Lincoln’s victory with armed rebellion, Douglass understood it as a reaction to the emancipatory potential of this new alliance. The “war of the Rebels,” he declared in 1863, “is a war of the rich against the poor. Let Slavery go down with the war, and let labor cease to be fettered, chained, flogged, and branded…and then we shall see as never before, the laborers in all sections of this country rising to respectability and power.”

ouglass lived to see his cross-sectional alliance of laborers—what Du Bois later called “the abolition-democracy”—successfully crush the rebellion, destroy slavery, and drive the most profound social revolution in American history. He lived, too, to see that alliance undone, and many of its achievements rolled back, by the resistance of white Southerners and the connivance of a Northern leadership that, as he wrote in 1894, had “converted the Republican party into a party of money rather than a party of morals.”

Struggle begat progress, and progress begat more struggle. This was the work of politics, of public agitation and democratic organization: It never ends. Douglass himself never tired of the fight or lost sight of his horizon—a political force “broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime.” For Douglass, that meant ceaseless resistance to all forms of entrenched hierarchy, including the exclusion of women from politics. When he died suddenly on a February evening in 1895, his final day had been spent with Susan B. Anthony and Anna Shaw at a women’s suffrage meeting in Washington, DC.

Douglass devoted his life to eternal war on both “the system” and “the spirit of slavery.” The system went down in 1865, but the spirit, of course, lives on with us today, reorganized and remastered with all the perennial shrewdness of the ruling classes. It lives in every social order that contrives to elevate one group at the expense of another, every economic order that exalts capital and degrades labor, and every political order that denies the possibility of great change.

“This doctrine of human equality,” Doug­lass wrote in 1850, “is the bitterest yet taught by the abolitionists.” The struggle for that doctrine remains the central struggle of our day. It requires political as well as moral action, organizing as well as orations. Just as in Douglass’s day, we can only prevail if we believe we will win.